Replacing my MacBook Pro battery

So after a few years of daily driving my M2 MacBook Pro, I noticed it just wasn’t lasting as long between charges. The battery health was getting to about 80%, and for anyone who knows how I operate, I’m not the guy you can just ask to “borrow a charger real quick” because I don’t carry chargers, portable battery packs, or any of that. My portable endpoints are intended to be exactly that, portable, with no compromises. I’d rather spend an hour of my time and the cost of a battery replacement than to spend months, or years carrying around all this extra equipment, just to keep a (not-so) portable device with a failing battery alive. I went through that phase once with the worst tech purchase I ever made. I bought my buddy’s LG G5 off him for about the same price I could’ve bought a genuine refurb. Turned out the phone had internal water damage and even with new batteries, it wouldn’t last longer than a couple of hours, and always ran like a cooktop.

So I figured it was time. I did my research, knew where everything was under the hood of my MacBook. I knew from changing batteries in my iPhones that good ol Tim Apple probably took a PL gun and sealed everything together like he was building a 100 year home. Still to my surprise today, as I have absolutely no idea why this needs to even be the case with my MacBook, I had to remove all of the security screws holding in the bottom access panel in. Okay, pretty typical so far. But I had to get a suction cup to collect rent from this thing just to get it to budge, and still yet, once that seal finally cracked, I still needed to slide two connectors out by sliding the panel downward. If you just pull straight up, it won’t go, and I imagine if you pried too hard, it would just snap those clamps. Ik somewhere, Tim Apple’s sitting there, laughing, and saying “no no, that was supposed to be traded in by now, I need your trade-in money to buy some more PL for next year’s lineup”.

Then there comes the atrocity of this battery connection. They could’ve just used one connector for power and data, just like any normal manufacturer. But nope, that’s just not the Tim Apple way. Somewhere in a Cupertino boardroom, some Gaslight associate thought it would be “innovative” if they separated the power and data connections. Power being this flimsy metal plate that stays attached to the logic board and makes pressure-contact with the battery under a screw (lord forbid if you flex this thing too much. Snap it off the logic board, and suddenly, you’ve got yourself a paperweight), and the data cable? Goes into the absolute smallest, most tedious microscopic connector I’ve seen in quite a while!

The battery itself, of course, has Tim Apple’s signature PL all over it. You practically need a prybar and a hammer just to dislodge this thing so you can get the old battery out of there. Obviously, not recommended to raw-dog it like a demo job, so I was pretty much stuck with plastic pry tools, prying a little bit at a time, trying to distribute the contact points to avoid warping or puncturing the battery (because of course, Tim Apple also wants to make sure you get your money’s worth with a fireworks show if you get a little too creative when you’re pulling his 100 year fixture out). After struggling for what felt like an eternity, on all three battery packs (because they just slapped together what appears to be three batteries daisy chained together), you finally have the residue of all the PL you just delaminated. So I cleaned that up, placed the new battery in place, thought I had everything connected perfectly, but knowing Tim Apple’s tricks, I always test devices while they’re still partially disassembled, just in case the surgery didn’t go over as planned.

Sure enough, the MacBook boots up, the fan’s spinning like a jet turbine, battery has an “X” over top of it, and the system’s lagging harder than a Windows XP era Pentium trying to run Elden Ring in 4K on Windows 11. Ahh, classic Apple gaslighting. At first, I thought perhaps it was because this wasn’t an “officially recognized battery”. Then I remembered what a pain it was just to get the data connector seated. So I powered the MacBook off, flipped it back over, and re-seated the cable. Laptop powered itself on while I was still trying to seat the connector (idk if the cable jostling sent a signal to power on or what). Yeah, the last thing you want to hear when you’ve got your hands inside your MacBook, trying to get a connector in place is the classic Apple “BWAAAAAH” startup sound, followed by the fan slapping redline. I dropped everything and immediately powered this back down. After quite a bit of meticulous manoeuvring, I was actually able to seat the connector properly. Powered it up, and to my surprise, everything worked perfectly, no unauthorized battery gaslighting like you get with the iPhone, and it actually read the battery health (which iPhone does finally do post iOS 18, but still gaslights you first. Before that? You’d never know what your health was on aftermarket batteries).

Overall, I very much did appreciate the challenge. I do get a certain feeling of accomplishment from repairing something that Apple’s explicitly designed to be non-serviceable, and inherently anti-consumer. It’s my device, my property, I worked hard to make the money that purchased it, nobody but me should ever have claim to any part of that device. Trade-in “equity” is just corporate gaslighting from companies that want to lock you into an endless treadmill of financing. I don’t rent my devices, and when I do my own work to revive them, I actually feel a sort of deeper bond with my devices. Like they now have a piece of my personality inside of them.

Sure, my M2 chip may be getting “dated” by today’s standards, and perhaps 8 GB RAM isn’t quite as good as it once was. But when I’m hosting my own jump servers off a Ryzen 9 mini PC with 64 GB RAM, and 6 TB total SSD storage? The MacBook simply becomes yet another endpoint. It doesn’t need to be a supercomputer. If I want to perform tasks that require massive amounts of graphics, memory, and CPU processing power? I’ll offload that to my server and continue going about my day. In fact, this is inherently better than buying a more powerful Mac and acting like “one machine to rule them all” is the golden playbook. By hosting my own servers, I can start a demanding task on my server, using my MacBook as a remote terminal, get the process initiated, and while it’s running that task in the background? I can close the remote session, close my MacBook, walk off with it, take it someplace else, sit down, and casually use it the way it should be used, as a casual laptop to do light tasks. You know, rather than spending many thousands of dollars on upgrades ($250 for every 8 GB RAM, $250 for every additional 256 GB storage), only to run that same process locally on a MacBook that costs as much as a used car, while it sits there, baking on a table, red hot, fans spinning like a jet turbine, and knowing I need to keep it plugged in, stationary, and that one process is eating up all my available resources.